Quotes About Story

The] reader is not primarily interested in plot. He is interested in what happens because he is interested in the character it happens to. No incident has any place in the story unless it has an emotional impact on the character--and on the reader. Newbery Acceptance Speech

I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.

I got to the end of the story before I'd realized what she'd done. Just as Jake had waited, interviewing the Mariners, Jillian had waited out my first answers so that I would give her a better one.

Dad used to say a story was worth writing if it made a difference to even one person. in Paper Daughter

I keep telling this story - different people, different places, different times - but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.

It's only a story, you say. So it is, and the rest of life with it - creation story, love story, horror, crime, the strange story of you and I. The alphabet of my DNA shapes certain words, but the story is not told. I have to tell it myself. What is it that I have to tell myself again and again? That there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story. Begin.

The continuous narrative of existence is a lie. There is no continuous narrative, there are lit-up moments, and the rest is dark. When you look closely, the twenty-four hour day is framed into a moment; the still-life of the jerky amphetamine world. That woman-a pieta. Those men, rough angels with an unknown message. The children holding hands, spanning time. And in every still-life, there is a story, the story that tells you everything you need to know.

It was a long story, and like most of the stories in the world, never finished. There was an ending - there always is - but the story went on past the ending - it always does.

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse — there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next. Love is an intervention.

History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open -- the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another.

Isn't there always a history to the story? You think you're living in the present, but the past is right behind you like a shadow.

Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

There was an ending - there always is - but the story went on past the ending - it always does.

I tried not to marry you because neither of us have a happy-ever-after story written inside us.

Cuando cayó la noche, vio la luz del faro del cabo de la Ira; solo hacía una semana que estaba encendida, pero estaba encendida, y supo que si se convertía a sí mismo en la historia de la luz, quizá se salvaría.

Yet as we travel deeper into the strange world of the story, the feeling we get is of being understood - which is odd when you think about it, because at school learning is based on whether or not we understand what we are reading. In fact it is the story (or the poem) that is understanding us. Books read us back to ourselves.

If there are only four possible endings to any story – comedy, tragedy, revenge and forgiveness –

La espada gasta la vaina, dice el proverbio. He aquí mi historia. He vivido de mis pasiones y mis pasiones me han matado.

The story of human nature is a fair romance. Am I to blame if it is not found elsewhere? I am trying to write the history of mankind. If my book is a romance, the fault lies with those who deprave mankind.

The Photograph and the Journal

Real journalists pride themselves on getting it first and right; they get to the bottom of the story

Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb